DoughNET.com Lets Teens Shop Online Without a Credit Card And Get Smart About Money at the Same Time
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 1999--A unique, full-service money management site for teenagers is live, prepared to take on the emerging $140 billion e-commerce-for-kids market.
DoughNET.com is a fun, functional, and easy to use financial tool for 13 to 18-year-olds that integrates online shopping without credit cards with online accounts -- and offers the technology that allows teens to buy as well as save, budget and donate, and learn about investing for the future.
For teenagers, who are spending more and more time online, the attraction to DoughNET.com will be the shopping -- an online activity from which they have been largely excluded because they don't have credit cards. DoughNET.com has partnered with some favorite teen retailers including REEL.com, CDNOW, Urban Decay, Alloy Online, Egghead.com, ShopSports.com, Activision, iTurf Inc.'s (Nasdaq:TURF) dELiAs.cOm and Fossil.
According to Teen Research Unlimited, in 1998 teens spent $140 billion, mostly on themselves, but only 1 per cent of their money was spent online. With the launching of DoughNET.com, the gaping hole in the teen e-commerce market is about to be filled.
"Our goal from the beginning was to create a free, safe, secure age-appropriate environment for teens and their families to learn about finance in the real world," said DoughNET Inc.'s President Ginger Thomson, a former investment banker and San Francisco mother of three with a Harvard MBA who started the company last year with entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jon Hamren, her husband.
The pair put together an impressive management and technical team with experience from Wells Fargo Bank, First Boston, DLJ, Sequoia Capital, the Cypress Fund, MTV, Broderbund Software, Mindscape, Sun Microsystems, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, Nickelodeon, Disney and Lifetime Cable. Together they intend to make DoughNET.com the first e-commerce site ever to connect online buying with online banking in real time.
Here's how DoughNET.com works: Parents open real accounts for their teens that function as virtual debit cards. Whether they are buying the latest release from CDNOW for $12.95 or giving $25 to the Rainforest Alliance, the transactions will be deducted in real time from the DoughNET.com account. No consumer debt and no overdrawn accounts to worry about. Before any purchase, the DoughNET.com service will remind the member how much he has in his account, the balance after the transaction and if he would like to proceed or not.
DoughNET.com is designed to encourage teens to be financially independent -- but with guidance from their parents. DoughNET.com can be customized to address each family's specific concerns and needs. Families can decide how much their teens can spend, say in a week, and where they can spend it. "There are no tools that help parents teach kids about money and using it effectively," said Thomson. "We see DoughNET.com as that tool."
The site takes advantage of the existing Web infrastructure so DoughNET.com members shop in a partner's own Web space. The only difference is at checkout time. The transaction will be automatically deducted from the DoughNET.com's account. The online retailer, meanwhile, fulfills the order, business as usual. Only information that needs to be released is sent to the merchant to protect each member's privacy. Because of the special turn-key technology developed by DoughNET Inc., merchants do not need to make modifications to their own site to be a partner.
The DoughNET.com site is filled with useful financial information for teens -- from tips on how to play the stock market to tools that will help teens save for that car in the future. Because DoughNET.com believes that money should be spent on community as well as ourselves, the content-rich Donations section of the site is designed to help young people get involved in nonprofit work. Nonprofit partners include Youth Service America, Natural Resource Defense Council, the Rainforest Alliance, and Impact Online. The intent is to get teens to give -- be it time, energy, resources or money, as part of their financial lives.
Thomson and Hamren included the input of teenagers in developing the site and encourage teens to get involved in building DoughNET.com into a resource for all money matters relating to teenagers. The pair also brings to this venture the savvy of seasoned business pros, the instincts of thoughtful parents and the heart of true believers in helping teens become fiscally responsible. "The hook for teens may be the shopping but learning to plan for how you use your money is endemic to DoughNET.com if we've done our job right," said Thomson.
CONTACT: DoughNET.com
Ginger Thomson, 415/561-0500 ext. 201
Kathryn Davis, 415/561-0500 ext. 228
Pam Grisman, 415/561-0500 ext. 225
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